Our fourth annual global survey reveals current trends in data use and the challenges in connecting to disruptive sources across SaaS, RDBMS, NoSQL, and big data.

Last week, Progress released a survey that reveals increasing adoption of big data, explosive growth in SaaS data sources, continued use of relational databases, and growing adoption of NoSQL. Concerns about increasing data sources, data variety, and integrating cloud data with on-premises data are the top challenges faced by survey respondents.

49% are challenged with integrating an increasing number of data sources.

71% are concerned about data breaches as they integrate cloud with ground.

What big data sources do you or your customers currently use? And which do you or your customers plan to adopt in the next two years?

The 2017 Data Connectivity Outlook surveyed 1,200 participants around the globe in various technical and business roles, representing a range of industries and organization sizes. It uncovers the top databases and data access interfaces, as well as popular applications and technologies used to connect database silos. You can download the entire report here.

Standards Adoption Growing

Given the variety of data sources reported by participants, it’s no surprise that the use of SQL and REST data access standards is increasing. Respondents are leveraging open standards to easily connect the expanding hybrid environment.

From 2016 to 2017, use of ODBC increased 11%, JDBC 11%, OData 3%, while REST increased significantly by 19%:

Hybrid Connectivity Now a Requirement

Regardless of how the data landscape is evolving, the survey shows that enterprises still have significant investments in on-premises RDBMS and big data. With SaaS adoption increasing, seamlessly integrating the two environments is a requirement.

Challenges in Accessing Data Behind a Firewall

To connect cloud and ground, the majority of respondents use VPN or SSH tunneling to traverse the firewall. However, participants still voiced plenty of concerns about accessing data behind a firewall from the cloud:

Open Analytics Growing as Adoption of Embedded Analytics Increases

For a competitive edge, organizations are adopting multiple analytics and reporting solutions and using open standards to connect to the data. The total share of respondents using reporting and analytics tools is 63%. Overall, participants use standard SQL and REST interfaces for:

The survey shows that companies are adopting both embedded analytics and external analytics tools. This trend is giving rise to open analytics, which enables applications to expose standard SQL (ODBC, JDBC) or REST (OData) interfaces, even if a BI solution is embedded.